The Cataclysm release date has been confirmed as Tuesday 7th December. Now the interesting and totally self serving thing about this is that it is also my birthday, so I’m really pleased. Thank you Blizzard for the thought, such a wonderful gift. I’d hate to think of how the scale of this gift could be topped, – kidding.

But I have a issue: How am I meant to be playing the expansion (or downloading the last patch and waiting) on my birthday when my partner and family probably expect me to be talking to them that day?

Well the reality is that we will all be patching that day, and that Tuesday will probably mean more like Wednesday or Thursday. So as long as (a) it all goes smoothly, (b) I can get online, and (c) I can create a reasonable build; it will be a great birthday week.

“Cataclysm includes the best content we’ve ever created for World of Warcraft. It’s not just an expansion, but a re-creation of much of the original Azeroth, complete with epic new high-level adventures for current players and a redesigned leveling experience for those just starting out,” – Mike Morhaime

It is safe to say that I am very excited, even if you ignore the hype and flashy improvements there is still a lot of new and strange things to explore. I expect we will see a return of some players to the game due to this in the short term.

Seems a big ask, but I’d be keen to see what could be done to make the druid forms more mutable. The idea (which has been blundered around the forums for years) would be so that the armour and weapon selections that are made are somehow reflected on the models.

At the moment some of the models have small items of jewelry but nothing that would distinguish one cat from another. Could the models be altered to change to show a shoulder, helm, and cloak affect?

This would not have to mean adding a skullcap to a cat (because that could look darn silly), but instead we could see changes to the models to reflect the gear – akin to seeing a naked bear turning into an armoured war bear. Boomkin and Tree forms could still show cloaks, and maybe shoulders, and cats and bears could easily show different collars, etc.

It would have also been an alternate solution to the tree form being removed; if the tree would actually be somewhat customised.

I have a guldmate who is literally obsessed with mounts, and finally got her Bird mount from the Sethek Halls. Grats Genowen.

This is the one item that I think she’d never get tired of, and would strike fear and loathing into her guildmates. Which is kind of par for the course. I’m thinking of Nesty (one of the resident Shadow Priests) as the target for this.

Quick thought I had while tring to suss out invite mods, guild events, and all sorts of other tricky tasks – the in game calendar could be greatly improved by make the accept in calendar sign-ups also allow selection of role.

Meaning the selection of Tank, Heal, Range, or Melee; and having a sort on that field, just like the sort on guildmember rank, etc. Off-spec would be handy too, but not nearly as good as having the role that the character will bring to the raid.

A week ago I changed from Recount to Skada for tracking damage. My first main reason was memory use in the game, as I was told that Skada has a lower memory footprint. Now that is slightly true, although I think if you have 11 meg in use for Recount and only 7 for Skada (which were my stats), then I don’t see that as a huge change; but lower is better.

It does not tell me which of the two actually consume more resources and processing while running though, which is something that I think has more bearing on “lag” that players complain about. The cpu processing might actually be more important than the raw amount of data the mod needs to hold. i.e. I can write a routine that burns cpu cycles, but only uses a small amount memory; and vice versa. And I’ve not found any reference to wow mods that tells me which is dangerious to game performance.

Recount in action

Skada performs the same basic functions as Recount. If you have one, the other will not significantly change your game. Initially I missed some of the information that Recount makes very obvious, but I am finding that I really don’t overly care 95% of the time, and now I can live without it the remaining 5%.

My major beef with Skada is how obtuse it is to change the visual presentation. The default settings are too small in my opinion.

Particularly the font size is slightly too small on the small screen I play on, and that means that its difficult to tell what the stats are. Mostly this bothers me because I also not to wear my glasses while playing, but in general I should not have to squint to see the bar values. It could be said that I don’t need that level of understanding, but for a dps player; we all know that ego makes it important.

To fix this open the options.lua file in the base directory of the mod, and change the “barfontsize=11” line, to read a higher number. I found that 12 or 13 was plenty.